From the course: After Effects: Principles of Motion Graphics

Creative process: File organization - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects: Principles of Motion Graphics

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Creative process: File organization

- [Instructor] As much as I'd like to gloss over this topic, talking about file management is really one of the most important things to manage when creating motion graphics. Since After Effects can accept just about any kind of file, things can often get out of control very quickly if you have files strewn across multiple folders on multiple hard drives. So, in this video, we're going to talk about a folder structure I found rather helpful. But, I want you to feel free to tweak and adjust things for your specific workflow. So, please, just use this as a general guide. Now, if you work in a video house or collaborate with others across a network, you can definitely adjust this to work on a shared drive. However, in this example, I'm going to set things up as though you're working solo on a laptop. So, if we navigate in our exercise files folder, in the 01_Motion_Graphics folder, you'll see the 02_File_Organization folder and in there, I have yet another folder, and this one is 00_Project_Name. That means you can number this and then add your project name into this field. I tend to renumber my folders based on the number of projects I'm working on at any given time, so each month I'll start at zero again. You can choose to renumber yours based on the volume. You might need to do it every week, whatever you like. Now, inside this folder, I have a bunch of other empty folders that I can use to organize the files I'm working on. So, 00_Inspiration, that obviously contains any elements that I use as inspiration, whether it's something the client sends me or something I just find interesting that I took a photograph of and wanted to save, I'll save it in this folder. 01_Textures, this is where I save any textures that I'd like to use in my project. I'm always taking random pictures of textures, whether it's walls or floors, to save and use in future projects. It just adds another layer of style to my graphics. Now, the next three folders are format-specific, meaning that 02_Ai is where I save my Illustrator files. 03_Psds, Photoshop files. 04_Ae, this is finally where I save my After Effects projects. The reason this isn't the 01 folder is the fact that, most of the time, I do my pre-visualization work in Illustrator or Photoshop before I ever bring things into After Effects. In the 05_Edits folder, this is where I'll save edited sequences. Whether it's an actual video file or a Premiere Pro project, this is where it goes. Then 06_Approvals, this is where I'll render any approval files that I'm going to send off to a client. I rarely delete anything out of the approvals folder because it's actually a really good record to see the progress of a project as you continue working through the process. Now, the last folder, 07_High_Res_Renders, this is where I'll save any of my final output files. So, that's it. Once you've actually got a folder structure you like that works well for your individual workflow, I recommend right-clicking or CTRL + clicking on the project folder and then choose Compress and that'll go ahead and create a zip file for the empty folders. This way, anytime I have new designer working on a project with me, I'll send them the zip file and then when they double-click it, it'll automatically have an empty folder structure ready to customize for my individual project. This also really helps speed up the workflow between multiple people as a standard folder structure. Makes it really easy for other people to navigate where a project is at any given point in time.

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